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Nelnorna Ebonhearth
Nelnorna Ebonhearth History The archmage Herald Ebonhearth coupled with a poor woman once, in the king's city of Stormwind, and she bore him a son with one green eye and one black eye. Herald, who had two eyes black as the black swamps of Dustwallow Marsh, came and went like a wind out of the woman's life, but the child Neirr stayed in Stormwind until he was fifteen. Big-shouldered and strong, he was apprenticed to a smith, and men who came to have their carts mended or their horses shod were inclined to curse his slowness and his sullenness, until something stirred in him, sluggish as a marsh beast waking beneath murk. Then he would turn his head and look at them out of his black eye, and they would fall silent, shift away from him. There was a streak of wizardry in him, like the streak of fire in a damp, smoldering wood. He spoke rarely to men with his brief, rough voice, but when he touched a horse, a hungry dog, or a dove in a cage on market days, the fire would surface in his black eye, and his voice would run sweet as the daydreaming whisper of the streams in Nordrassil. One day he left Stormwind and travelled deep into the snowy hills of the Hinterlands. Aerie Peak was the tallest mountain in the Hinterlands, rising above and casting its black shadow over the forests below, at twilight when the sun slipped, lost, into its mists. There, in the rich, dark forests of the Hinterlands, in the white silence, Neirr began a collection of wondrous, legendary animals. From the wild lake country of the Hinterlands, he called to him the Black Swan of Tirisfal, the great-winged, golden-eyed bird that had carried Lillian Voss on its back away from the stone tower where she was held captive. He sent the powerful, silent thread of his call into the deep, thick forests on the other side of the Hinterlands, where no man had ever gone and returned, and caught like a salmon the red-eyed, white-tusked boar Gromal, who could sing ballads like a harpist, and who knew the answers to all riddles save one. From the dark, silent heart of the mountain itself, Neirr brought Yveria, the green-winged dragon, whose mind, dreaming for centuries over the cold fire of cold, worke sleepily, pleasurably, to the sound of its name in the half-forgotten song Neirr sent crooning into the darkness. Coaxing a handful of ancient jewels from the dragon, Neirr built a house of white, polished stone among the tall pines, and a great garden for the animals enclosed within the ring of stone wall and iron-wrought gates. Into that house he took eventually a young priestess with few words and no fear either of the animals or their keeper. In Neirr's house she saw things that others saw perhaps once in their lives in a line of poetry or in a harpist's tale. She bore Neirr a daughter with two black eyes who learned to stand silent as a dead tree while Neirr called. Neirr taught her to read the ancient ballads and legends in the books he collected, taught her to send the call of a half-forgotten name across the whole of the Hinterlands and lands beyond, taught her to wait in silence, in patience for weeks, months, or years until the moment when the shock of the call would flame in the strange, powerful, startled mind of the animal that owned the name. She grew tall and strong in the Hinterlands wildness, with her mother's slender bones and ebon hair and her father's black, fearless eyes. She cared for the animals, tended the garden, and learned early how to hold a restless animal against its will, how to send an ancient name out of the silence of her mind, to probe into hidden, forgotten places. Neirr, proud of her quickness, built a room for her with a great dome of crystal, thin as glass, strong as sone, where she could sit beneath the colors of the night world and call in peace. He died when she was sixteen, leaving her alone with the beautiful white house, a vast library of heavy, iron-bound books, a collection of animals beyond all dreaming, and the power to hold them. She read one night not long afterward, in one of his oldest books, of a great white bird with wings that glided like snowy pennants unfurled in the wind, a bird that had carried the lady Tyranade Whisperwind on its back to battle days long before. She spoke the name to herself: Liralen. ''And, seated on the floor beneath the dome, with the book still open in her lap, she sent a first call forth into the vast forest night for the bird whose name no one had spoken for centuries. The call was broken abruptly by someone shouting at her locked gates. She woke the Neferset lion known as Tern, asleep in the garden, with a touch of her mind, and sent it padding to the gates to cast a golden, warning eye at the intruder. But the shouting continued, urgent, incoherent. She sighed, exasperated, and sent the elven Falcon Helk instructions to lift the intruder and drop him off the top of Aerie Peak. The shouting ceased suddenly, a moment later, but a baby's thin, uncomforted voice wailed into the silence, startling her. She rose finally, stalking through the marble hall in her bare feet, out into the garden, where the animals stirred restlessly in the darkness about her. She reached the gates of thin iron bars and gold joints, and looked out. The tall, cloaked shadow of a man darted off into the silent snow, leaving a frail infant in a beaten woven basket before the iron-wrought gates. The child in the basket cried, oblivious. *''I told you, ''Nelnorna spoke privately, ''to drop him off the top of Aerie Peak. *The blue, unwavering eyes of the falcon looked down into hers. You are young, but you are without doubt powerful, and I will obey you if you tell me a second time. But I will tell you first, having known men for countless years, that if you begin killing them, one day they will grow frightened, come in great numbers, tear down your house, and loose your animals. So the master Neirr told us many times. Nelnorna's bare foot tapped a moment on the earth. She moved her eyes to the pale face and blue eyes of the infant, sighing, and slowly unlocked the gates. She dropped to the ground sluggishly, lifting it from the basket with one hand rested on its back and the other cupping its head, smiling softly as it tugged curiously at her long ebon hair. The child was named Rianna, and she grew to be tall and elegant, like Nelnorna, and learned to stand strong as she sent the silent calls of the beasts in her mind, touching theirs and waking them from their long, ancient sleep, and sent them calling back to her, following her voice, albeit unwillingly.